See you again
by Dancing Nebulas
Summary: While Rose is waiting in a park for the dimension cannon to recharge a mysterious woman asks to sit next to her on the bench.


"Do you mind if I sit down?" a Yorkshire accented voice asked, causing Rose's eyes to lift from where they had been staring at the clearing of trees across from her. When she looked up Rose stared for a moment, her eyes blinking as she stared at the figure obscured in the shadows of the dwindling twilight and swallowed by the blacks and greys of her clothes.

The woman lowered her hood blonde hair glinting in the dying sun as a small sad smile tugs at the corners of her lips. The look in the woman's eyes achingly familiar as she meets the stranger's gaze. She only caught it for a moment, in the dying light of the sun but the look in her eyes when they met, wide wet eyes fixed on her with an expression that stared at her in the mirror far too many times. What had happened to this woman.

Rose looked at her straightening up as she checked the watch on her wrist, ten minutes to go. She had enough time to listen if the woman wanted to talk, or needed too. It's what the Doctor would have done.

"You alright?" the strange woman asked before she could even begin to talk.

"Yeah 'm fine."

"Then why were you staring at that clearing?"

"Just," Rose pauses before taking a breath "lost in a memory."

"Not a happy one judging from the look on your face."

"'S not that. I came here once with a friend of mine, me 'n' him, had a picnic. We sat just over there," Rose says softly lifting her hand and gesturing at the clearing just across from the footpath. "Just sat there for hours, talking about everything and nothing, done it a million times before but it was one of the last happy times we were together before we got separated."

The woman didn't say anything, just looked at her, another sad smile on her lips as she listened to Rose tell her story the pressure building behind her eyes as she continued to talk.

"I'm trying to get back to him but every time I get close I always miss him, I get there just before he should be there or just after." Rose stopped abruptly her voice cracking with the last work, realizing she had said too much. Before she could open her mouth though the woman began to talk.

"I lost someone once, was separated from them actually, just like you and your bloke," before she could open her mouth to protest the woman smiled at her again, her face a mirror to the expression on Rose's own.

"Did you ever find him?" she asked, voice tentative.

"Her actually" the woman replied, a faint spark in her eyes now, as if there was a joke that Rose was missing.

She opens her mouth to ask, but the stranger continues her story "We found each other, but there was someone else too, someone who could give her the life she deserved, make her happy, say and do everything I never could so I let her go."

"What happened to her?" Rose whispers, her heart aching as she looks at the woman, trying to imagine being in her place, to have to give up the Doctor after only just finding him again. She shuddered, to be reunited with the woman she loved only to give her up again. Rose's heart ached for the stranger next to her as her cheeks dampened.

"I don't know, might have married and settled down, maybe had a kid or two, but I like to think she's traveling now, out there" the woman gestures up at the stars, "But wherever she is, whenever she is I hope she knows that all I ever wanted was her to be happy and that I'm sorry I hurt her."

Rose could feel the eyes of the woman on her as she spoke, and for the first-time Rose caught a proper glimpse of the eyes staring into hers.

They looked old, so old. Painful and sad, but happy and joyous too.

"Don't give up okay Rose, remember that songs end. But stories? They go on forever."

The woman smiled at her as she reached over, squeezing Rose's shoulder once before standing pulling her hood back up over her hair as she begins to walk away.

Rose opens her mouth standing, ready to run after the woman and ask what the stranger could mean when she realizes she had never told the woman her name.

"Do-?!"

* * *

Rose gasps as her eyes blink open.

"Rose?" the Doctor mutters voice thick with sleep.

"Nothing Doctor, just a memory, go back to sleep" she says, smiling as she moves closer to her already dozing husband.

Squeezing their linked hand as she smiles, looking up at the stars from their bedroom window.

 _Not quite yet Doctor, but soon._


End file.
